The lost weekend

OK, so it was not a weekend, and not as Oscar-worthy as the movie of that name (which is brilliant, by the way – you should watch it if you’ve never seen it). It was a few days during the week, and yours truly was back in the hospital with pneumonia. Again.

The first sign of an issue: I slept for almost 11 hours straight, without waking up. Not normal for someone who regularly wakes up every 2 to 2.5 hours. When I got up, I couldn’t really see – everything was sparkly, and not in the sparkly vampire sense, but in the sense of standing up too quickly, or getting heat stroke. So, we took my blood pressure, which was a rather alarming 64/48, then twice more because hey, you have to confirm these things, and the other two were not much different. I also stuck a finger in my handy pulse ox (O2) thing and it came back as 76%. Stuck it on another finger and got 80%. None of this is good. We called 911 and yours truly took a delightful ride in the ambulance to the ER. They gave me oxygen and fluids and finally I was back into normal ranges. But, I also got admitted because the chest xray showed lower lobe pneumonia, and they wanted to nuke me with some IV antibiotics.

And here’s where those sensitive to descriptions of bodily functions should stop reading. Seriously, if, say, reading about people puking gives you the heebie jeebies, stop here. I mean it.

The point of it all is to kill all the bad stuff, knocking it down quickly to a level where you can go home and take more antibiotics the way any normal person would take them, for x days. The problem is that those large doses of antibiotics kill everything – including the good little bacterial guys humming around in your guts, happily keeping things stabilized down there. You know what happens then?

Explosive diarrhea. And I don’t mean that in the joking, ha-ha sense, I mean that in the “OMG, am I going to make it to the bathroom before I shit my pants and the bed and everything between me and the bathroom” sense.

Fortunately, it’s kind of easy to tell from the gut rumbles when the time is close, so the astute patient hauls their ass out of bed and into the bathroom. This was made easier for me this time because they didn’t have me continuously hooked up to the IVs, so I was free to get up without having to take the IV stand with me.

And then, I got my independence from the hospital on Independence Day, July 4! I made my escape back to the ranch, and have two antibiotics to take, along with something they quaintly describe as being “for loose stool”. Thankfully, the doses are not high enough to cause me to have to race to the bathroom, so things are not quite as explosive as they were in the hospital. We should be thankful for some small favor every day, and right now, that one’s mine.